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Inventing the Alien in Early Science Fiction Sean Guynes-Vishniac Many of the world’s literary traditions record tales of voyages beyond or off Earth to populated worlds inhabited either by physiologically similar humans, humanoids, or nonhumanoid aliens. What follows offers a brief glimpse of the ways in which science fiction shaped the figure of the alien, from the early sources of the Western literary tradition to the beginning of the “Golden Age” of science fiction in 1939. Perhaps the most famous premodern example of aliens in literature is Lucian of Samosata’s second-century AD parodic True History, detailing Lucian’s imagined travels into the Atlantic Ocean, whereupon his ship is shot by a waterspout to the moon. Once there, Lucian and his companions witness a war between the peoples of the moon and sun over rights to colonize Venus, satirizing contemporary impe- rial contests over land in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Lucian’s aliens include mushroom people and dog-faced people who ride flying acorns, exotic beings drafted into the armies of the rulers of the moon and sun. Lucian’s True History projected humorous folk and mythological understandings of the possi- bilities of nonhuman existence beyond the pale of the “civilized” world, long dis- cussed in relation to the geographical expanses beyond the known world of Europe, Africa, and Asia, to the stellar bodies known to the Greek astronomers. In the ever-continuing debate over the “first” work of science fiction, Lucian’s True History is often pointed to as a forerunner. It certainly marks the earliest extant entry of the alien into the Western imagination and presents the alien in ways familiar still: as entertainment, as allegory, as extrapolative possibility. In the centuries that followed, the existence—or not—of aliens in Western fiction and thought rested on key epistemic, metaphysical, and theological debates over the nature of the universe, existence, and divinity. Perhaps the single greatest influence on understandings of what inhabited other planets was the development in Islamic and later Christian humanist thought of cosmic pluralism, building on earlier writing by ancient Greek philosophers and natural historians like